Biblio

With the dramatic increase in malicious software, the sophistication and innovation of malware have increased over the years. In particular, the dynamic analysis based on the deep neural network has shown high accuracy in malware detection. However, most of the existing methods only employ the raw API sequence feature, which cannot accurately reflect the actual behavior of malicious programs in detail. The relationship between API calls is critical for detecting suspicious behavior. Therefore, this paper proposes a malware detection method based on the graph neural network. We first connect the API sequences executed by different processes to build a directed process graph. Then, we apply Bert to encode the API sequences of each process into node embedding, which facilitates the semantic execution information inside the processes. Finally, we employ GCN to mine the deep semantic information based on the directed process graph and node embedding. In addition to presenting the design, we have implemented and evaluated our method on 10,000 malware and 10,000 benign software datasets. The results show that the precision and recall of our detection model reach 97.84% and 97.83%, verifying the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Healthcare sectors such as hospitals, nursing homes, medical offices, and hospice homes encountered several obstacles due to the outbreak of Covid-19. Wearing a mask, social distancing and sanitization are some of the most effective methods that have been proven to be essential to minimize the virus spread. Lately, medical executives have been appointed to monitor the virus spread and encourage the individuals to follow cautious instructions that have been provided to them. To solve the aforementioned challenges, this research study proposes an autonomous medical assistance robot. The proposed autonomous robot is completely service-based, which helps to monitor whether or not people are wearing a mask while entering any health care facility and sanitizes the people after sending a warning to wear a mask by using the image processing and computer vision technique. The robot not only monitors but also promotes social distancing by giving precautionary warnings to the people in healthcare facilities. The robot can assist the health care officials carrying the necessities of the patent while following them for maintaining a touchless environment. With thorough simulative testing and experiments, results have been finally validated.

Data security is the process of protecting data from loss, alteration, or unauthorised access during its entire lifecycle. It includes everything from the policies and practices of a company to the hardware, software, storage, and user devices used by that company. Data security tools and technology increase transparency into an organization's data and its usage. These tools can protect data by employing methods including encryption and data masking personally identifiable information.. Additionally, the method aids businesses in streamlining their auditing operations and adhering to the increasingly strict data protection rules.

With the increasing number of distributed energy sources and the growing demand for free exchange of energy, Energy internet (EI) is confronted with great challenges of persistent connection, stable transmission, real-time interaction, and security. The new definition of metaverse in the EI field is proposed as a potential solution for these challenges by establishing a massive and comprehensive fusion 3D network, which can be considered as the advanced stage of EI. The main characteristics of the metaverse such as reality to virtualization, interaction, persistence, and immersion are introduced. Specifically, we present the key enabling technologies of the metaverse including virtual reality, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and digital twin. Meanwhile, the potential applications are presented from the perspectives of immersive user experience, virtual power station, management, energy trading, new business, device maintenance. Finally, some challenges of metaverse in EI are concluded.

Mortality from lung cancer has ranked high among cancers for many years. Early detection of lung cancer is critical for disease prevention, cure, and mortality rate reduction. Many existing detection methods on lung nodules can achieve high sensitivity but meanwhile introduce an excessive number of false-positive proposals, which is clinically unpractical. In this paper, we propose the multi-head detection and spatial attention network, shortly MHSnet, to address this crucial false-positive issue. Specifically, we first introduce multi-head detectors and skip connections to capture multi-scale features so as to customize for the variety of nodules in sizes, shapes, and types. Then, inspired by how experienced clinicians screen CT images, we implemented a spatial attention module to enable the network to focus on different regions, which can successfully distinguish nodules from noisy tissues. Finally, we designed a lightweight but effective false-positive reduction module to cut down the number of false-positive proposals, without any constraints on the front network. Compared with the state-of-the-art models, our extensive experimental results show the superiority of this MHSnet not only in the average FROC but also in the false discovery rate (2.64% improvement for the average FROC, 6.39% decrease for the false discovery rate). The false-positive reduction module takes a further step to decrease the false discovery rate by 14.29%, indicating its very promising utility of reducing distracted proposals for the downstream tasks relied on detection results.

We show that the most common flavors of noisy leakage can be simulated in the information-theoretic setting using a single query of bounded leakage, up to a small statistical simulation error and a slight loss in the leakage parameter. The latter holds true in particular for one of the most used noisy-leakage models, where the noisiness is measured using the conditional average min-entropy (Naor and Segev, CRYPTO’09 and SICOMP’12). Our reductions between noisy and bounded leakage are achieved in two steps. First, we put forward a new leakage model (dubbed the dense leakage model) and prove that dense leakage can be simulated in the information-theoretic setting using a single query of bounded leakage, up to small statistical distance. Second, we show that the most common noisy-leakage models fall within the class of dense leakage, with good parameters. Third, we prove lower bounds on the amount of bounded leakage required for simulation with sub-constant error, showing that our reductions are nearly optimal. In particular, our results imply that useful general simulation of noisy leakage based on statistical distance and mutual information is impossible. We also provide a complete picture of the relationships between different noisy-leakage models. Our result finds applications to leakage-resilient cryptography, where we are often able to lift security in the presence of bounded leakage to security in the presence of noisy leakage, both in the information-theoretic and in the computational setting. Remarkably, this lifting procedure makes only black-box use of the underlying schemes. Additionally, we show how to use lower bounds in communication complexity to prove that bounded-collusion protocols (Kumar, Meka, and Sahai, FOCS’19) for certain functions do not only require long transcripts, but also necessarily need to reveal enough information about the inputs.

Since the cyber and physical layers in the distribution system are deeply integrated, the traditional distribution system has gradually developed into the cyber-physical distribution system (CPDS), and the failures of the cyber layer will affect the reliable and safe operation of the whole distribution system. Therefore, this paper proposes an CPDS planning method considering the reliability of the cyber-physical system. First, the reliability evaluation model of CPDS is proposed. Specifically, the functional reliability model of the cyber layer is introduced, based on which the physical equipment reliability model is further investigated. Second, an optimal planning model of CPDS considering cyber-physical random failures is developed, which is solved using the Monte Carlo Simulation technique. The proposed model is tested on the modified IEEE 33-node distribution system, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In recent years, data security incidents caused by insider threats in distributed file systems have attracted the attention of academia and industry. The most common way to detect insider threats is based on user profiles. Through analysis, we realize that based on existing user profiles are not efficient enough, and there are many false positives when a stable user profile has not yet been formed. In this work, we propose personalized user profiles and design an insider threat detection framework, which can intelligently detect insider threats for securing distributed file systems in real-time. To generate personalized user profiles, we come up with a time window-based clustering algorithm and a weighted kernel density estimation algorithm. Compared with non-personalized user profiles, both the Recall and Precision of insider threat detection based on personalized user profiles have been improved, resulting in their harmonic mean F1 increased to 96.52%. Meanwhile, to reduce the false positives of insider threat detection, we put forward operation recommendations based on user similarity to predict new operations that users will produce in the future, which can reduce the false positive rate (FPR). The FPR is reduced to 1.54% and the false positive identification rate (FPIR) is as high as 92.62%. Furthermore, to mitigate the risks caused by inaccurate authorization for users, we present user tags based on operation content and permission. The experimental results show that our proposed framework can detect insider threats more effectively and precisely, with lower FPR and high FPIR.

New malware increasingly adopts novel fileless techniques to evade detection from antivirus programs. Process injection is one of the most popular fileless attack techniques. This technique makes malware more stealthy by writing malicious code into memory space and reusing the name and port of the host process. It is difficult for traditional security software to detect and intercept process injections due to the stealthiness of its behavior. We propose a novel framework called ProcGuard for detecting process injection behaviors. This framework collects sensitive function call information of typical process injection. Then we perform a fine-grained analysis of process injection behavior based on the function call chain characteristics of the program, and we also use the improved RCNN network to enhance API analysis on the tampered memory segments. We combine API analysis with deep learning to determine whether a process injection attack has been executed. We collect a large number of malicious samples with process injection behavior and construct a dataset for evaluating the effectiveness of ProcGuard. The experimental results demonstrate that it achieves an accuracy of 81.58% with a lower false-positive rate compared to other systems. In addition, we also evaluate the detection time and runtime performance loss metrics of ProcGuard, both of which are improved compared to previous detection tools.

In recent years, as an important part of the Internet, web applications have gradually penetrated into life. Now enterprises, units and institutions are using web applications regardless of size. Intrusion detection to effectively identify malicious traffic has become an inevitable requirement for the development of network security technology. In addition, the proportion of deserialization vulnerabilities is increasing. Traditional intrusion detection mostly focuses on the identification of SQL injection, XSS, and command execution, and there are few studies on the identification of deserialization attack traffic. This paper use a method to extracts relevant features from the deserialized traffic or even the obfuscated deserialized traffic by reorganizing the traffic and running the relevant content through simulation, and combines deep learning technology to make judgments to efficiently identify deserialization attacks. Finally, a prototype system was designed to capture related attacks in real-world. The technology can be used in the field of malicious traffic detection and help combat Internet crimes in the future.

This paper studies Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack detection by adopting the Deep Neural Network (DNN) model in Software Defined Networking (SDN). We first deploy the flow collector module to collect the flow table entries. Considering the detection efficiency of the DNN model, we also design some features manually in addition to the features automatically obtained by the flow table. Then we use the preprocessed data to train the DNN model and make a prediction. The overall detection framework is deployed in the SDN controller. The experiment results illustrate DNN model has higher accuracy in identifying attack traffic than machine learning algorithms, which lays a foundation for the defense against DDoS attack.

Based on the analysis of material performance data management requirements, a network-sharing scheme of material performance data is proposed. A material performance database system including material performance data collection, data query, data analysis, data visualization, data security management and control modules is designed to solve the problems of existing material performance database network sharing, data fusion and multidisciplinary support, and intelligent services Inadequate standardization and data security control. This paper adopts hierarchical access control strategy. After logging into the material performance database system, users can standardize the material performance data and store them to form a shared material performance database. The standardized material performance data of the database system shall be queried and shared under control according to the authority. Then, the database system compares and analyzes the material performance data obtained from controlled query sharing. Finally, the database system visualizes the shared results of controlled queries and the comparative analysis results obtained. The database system adopts the MVC architecture based on B/S (client/server) cross platform J2EE. The Third-party computing platforms are integrated in System. Users can easily use material performance data and related services through browsers and networks. MongoDB database is used for data storage, supporting distributed storage and efficient query.

Public transportation is an important system of urban passenger transport. The purpose of this article is to explore the impact of network resilience when each station of urban rail transit network was attacked by large passenger flow. Based on the capacity load model, we propose a load redistribution mechanism to simulate the passenger flow propagation after being attacked by large passenger flow. Then, taking Xi'an's rail network as an example, we study the resilience variety of the network after a node is attacked by large passenger flow. Through some attack experiments, the feasibility of the model for studying the resilience of the rail transit system is finally verified.

Present-day vehicles have numerous Electronic Control Units (ECUs) and they communicate with each other over a network known as the Controller Area Network(CAN) bus. In this way, the CAN bus is a fundamental component of intra-vehicle communication. The CAN bus was designed without focusing on communication security and in this way it is vulnerable to many cyber attacks. As the vehicles are always connected to the Internet, the CAN bus is remotely accessible and could be hacked. To secure the communication between ECUs and defend against these cyber attacks, we apply a Hash Message Authentication Code(HMAC) to automotive data and demonstrate the CAN bus communication between two ECUs using Arduino UNO and MCP2515 CAN bus module.

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) is a malicious attempt by attackers to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network. This is done by overwhelming the target and its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic. The multiple compromised computer systems (bots or zombies) then act as sources of attack traffic. Exploited machines can include computers and other network resources such as IoT devices. The attack results in either degraded network performance or a total service outage of critical infrastructure. This can lead to heavy financial losses and reputational damage. These attacks maximise effectiveness by controlling the affected systems remotely and establishing a network of bots called bot networks. It is very difficult to separate the attack traffic from normal traffic. Early detection is essential for successful mitigation of the attack, which gives rise to a very important role in cybersecurity to detect the attacks and mitigate the effects. This can be done by deploying machine learning or deep learning models to monitor the traffic data. We propose using various machine learning and deep learning algorithms to analyse the traffic patterns and separate malicious traffic from normal traffic. Two suitable datasets have been identified (DDoS attack SDN dataset and CICDDoS2019 dataset). All essential preprocessing is performed on both datasets. Feature selection is also performed before detection techniques are applied. 8 different Neural Networks/ Ensemble/ Machine Learning models are chosen and the datasets are analysed. The best model is chosen based on the performance metrics (DEEP NEURAL NETWORK MODEL). An alternative is also suggested (Next best - Hypermodel). Optimisation by Hyperparameter tuning further enhances the accuracy. Based on the nature of the attack and the intended target, suitable mitigation procedures can then be deployed.

Internet of Things (IoT) is widely present nowadays, from businesses to connected houses, and more. IoT is considered a part of the Internet of the future and will comprise billions of intelligent communication. These devices transmit data from sensors to entities like servers to perform suitable responses. The problem of securing these data from cyberattacks increases due to the sensitive information it contains. In addition, studies have shown that most of the time data transiting in IoT devices does not apply encrypted communication. Thus, anyone has the ability to listen to or modify the information. Encrypting communications seems mandatory to secure networks and data transiting from sensors to servers. In this paper, we propose an approach to secure the transmission and the storage of data in IoT using Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). The proposed method offers a high level of security at a reasonable computational cost. Indeed, we present an adequate architecture that ensures the use of a state-of-the-art cryptography algorithm to encrypt sensitive data in IoT.

Security authentication can effectively solve the problem of access to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites. However, the existing solutions still harbor some problems in the computational complexity of satellite authentication, flexible networking, resistance to brute force attacks and other aspects. So, a security authentication scheme for LEO satellites that integrates spatial channel characteristics is designed within the software defined network architecture. In this scheme, the spatial channel characteristics are introduced to the subsequent lightweight encryption algorithm to achieve effective defense against brute force attacks. According to security analysis and simulation results, the scheme can effectively reduce the computational overhead while protecting against replay attacks, brute force attacks, DOS attacks, and other known attacks.

The application of mobile intelligent terminal in the environment is very complex, and its own computing capacity is also very limited, so it is vulnerable to malicious attacks. The security classification of mobile intelligent terminals can effectively ensure the security of their use. Therefore, a security classification method for mobile intelligent terminals based on multi-source data fusion is proposed. The Boolean value is used to count the multi-source data of the mobile intelligent terminal, and the word frequency method is used to calculate the weight of the multi-source data of the mobile intelligent terminal. The D-S evidence theory is used to complete the multi-source data fusion of the mobile intelligent terminal and implement the multi-source data fusion processing of the mobile intelligent terminal. On this basis, the security level permission value of mobile intelligent terminal is calculated to achieve the security level division of mobile intelligent terminal based on multi-source data fusion. The experimental results show that the accuracy of mobile intelligent terminal security classification is higher than 96% and the classification time is less than 3.8 ms after the application of the proposed method. Therefore, the security level of mobile intelligent terminals after the application of this method is high, and the security performance of mobile intelligent terminals is strong, which can effectively improve the accuracy of security classification and shorten the time of security classification.

Technological innovations are expanding rapidly in the public safety sector providing opportunities for more targeted and comprehensive urban crime deterrence and detection. Yet, the spatial dispersion of crimes may vary over time. Therefore, it is unclear whether and how sensors can optimally impact crime rates. We developed a Smart City Digital Twin-based method to dynamically place license plate reader (LPR) sensors and improve their detection and deterrence performance. Utilizing continuously updated crime records, the convolutional long short-term memory algorithm predicted areas crimes were most likely to occur. Then, a Monte Carlo traffic simulation simulated suspect vehicle movements to determine the most likely routes to flee crime scenes. Dynamic LPR placement predictions were made weekly, capturing the spatiotemporal variation in crimes and enhancing LPR performance relative to static placement. We tested the proposed method in Warner Robins, GA, and results support the method's promise in detecting and deterring crime.

Over the years, false news has polluted the online media landscape across the world. In this “post-truth” era, the narratives created by false news have now come into fruition through dismantled democracies, disbelief in science, and hyper-polarized societies. Despite increased efforts in fact-checking & labeling, strengthening detection systems, de-platforming powerful users, promoting media literacy and awareness of the issue, false news continues to be spread exponentially. This study models the behaviors of both the victims of false news and the platform in which it is spread— through the system dynamics methodology. The model was used to develop a policy design by evaluating existing and proposed solutions. The results recommended actively countering confirmation bias, restructuring social networking sites’ recommendation algorithms, and increasing public trust in news organizations.

With the rapid development of Internet Technology in recent years, the demand for security support for complex applications is becoming stronger and stronger. Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX) is created as an extension of Intel Systems to enhance software security. Intel SGX allows application developers to create so-called enclave. Sensitive application code and data are encapsulated in Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) by enclave. TEE is completely isolated from other applications, operating systems, and administrative programs. Enclave is the core structure of Intel SGX Technology. Enclave supports multi-threading. Thread Control Structure (TCS) stores special information for restoring enclave threads when entering or exiting enclave. Each execution thread in enclave is associated with a TCS. This paper analyzes and verifies the possible security risks of enclave under concurrent conditions. It is found that in the case of multithread concurrency, a single enclave cannot resist flooding attacks, and related threads also throw TCS exception codes.

Code-reuse attacks (including ROP/JOP) severely threaten computer security. Control-flow integrity (CFI), which can restrict control flow in legal scope, is recognised as an effective defence mechanism against code-reuse attacks. Hardware-based CFI uses Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) extensions with additional hardware modules to implement CFI and achieve better performance. However, hardware-based fine-grained CFI adds new instructions to the ISA, which can not be executed on old processors and breaks the compatibility of programs. Some coarse-grained CFI designs, such as Intel IBT, maintain the compatibility of programs but can not provide enough security guarantees.To balance the security and compatibility of hardware CFI, we propose Transparent Forward CFI (TFCFI). TFCFI implements hardware-based fine-grained CFI designs without changing the ISA. The software modification of TFCFI utilizes address information and hint instructions in RISC-V as transparent labels to mark the program. The hardware module of TFCFI monitors the control flow during execution. The program modified by TFCFI can be executed on old processors without TFCFI. Benefiting from transparent labels, TFCFI also solves the destination equivalence problem. The experiment on FPGA shows that TFCFI incurs negligible performance overhead (1.82% on average).

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum achieve decentralized payment by maintaining a globally distributed and append-only ledger. Recently, several researchers have sought to achieve privacy-preserving auditing, which is a crucial function for scenarios that require regulatory compliance, for decentralized payment systems. However, those proposed schemes usually cost much time for the cooperation between the auditor and the user due to leveraging complex cryptographic tools such as zero-knowledge proof. To tackle the problem, we present T-PPA, a privacy-preserving decentralized payment system, which provides customizable and efficient auditability by leveraging trusted execution environments (TEEs). T-PPA demands the auditor construct audit programs based on request and execute them in the TEE to protect the privacy of transactions. Then, identity-based encryption (IBE) is employed to construct the separation of power between the agency nodes and the auditor and to protect the privacy of transactions out of TEE. The experimental results show that T-PPA can achieve privacy-preserving audits with acceptable overhead.

Databases are at the heart of modern applications and any threats to them can seriously endanger the safety and functionality of applications relying on the services offered by a DBMS. It is therefore pertinent to identify key risks to the secure operation of a database system. This paper identifies the key risks, namely, SQL injection, weak audit trails, access management issues and issues with encryption. A malicious actor can get help from any of these issues. It can compromise integrity, availability and confidentiality of the data present in database systems. The paper also identifies various means and ways to defend against these issues and remedy them. This paper then proceeds to identify from the literature, the potential solutions to these ameliorate the threat from these vulnerabilities. It proposes the usage of encryption to protect the data from being breached and leveraging encrypted databases such as CryptoDB. Better access control norms are suggested to prevent unauthorized access, modification and deletion of the data. The paper also recommends ways to prevent SQL injection attacks through techniques such as prepared statements.

The proliferation of real-time cyber-physical systems (CPS) is making profound changes to our daily life. Many real-time CPSs are security and safety-critical because of their continuous interactions with the physical world. While the general perception is that the security protection mechanism deployment is often absent in real-time embedded systems, there is no existing empirical study that measures the adoption of these mechanisms in the ecosystem. To bridge this gap, we conduct a measurement study for real-time embedded firmware from both a security perspective and a real-time perspective. To begin with, we collected more than 16 terabytes of embedded firmware and sampled 1,000 of them for the study. Then, we analyzed the adoption of security protection mechanisms and their potential impacts on the timeliness of real-time embedded systems. Besides, we measured the scheduling algorithms supported by real-time embedded systems since they are also security-critical.